Crosshair III Formula - latest BIOS.PhenomIIX4965,16GB RAM HyperX, 3HDDs, 630W NOX SLI-Certified PSU, Radeon HD6950 2GB(Sapphire dual fan). Everything was working just fine until some week ago..when I started Pinnacle and my system froze(Windows 7 Ultimate X64). I thought it would be the software but I even formatted and it still doesn't work. I have both XP X64 and 7 X64 and both freeze randomly now. Sometimes, when I open files or documents and stuff...they don't open immediately and the HDDs sometimes make that "start-up sound - no strange sounds but the typical start-up sound of an HDD". RAM&GPU are new.
I checked out every single connection and even replace the HDD cables(2 IDE drives and 1 SATA), but to no avail. I reset the BIOS settings - there was no OC applied on the system and everything worked fine until it started freezing up on me. I had the system overclocked for a while and it started giving BSODs so I just kept everything stock and it worked like a charm. I have a passively cooled 8600GT(does not require PCIEx cables) and used it to see if there was a problem with the video driver or the GPU - no luck. I disconnected most things and left only the basics connected - no luck either - the system still freezes. There are no overheating issues - I checked that. I ran memtest for various hours, HDD Regenerator on every single drive I have(took about 3,5 hours to complete but I did let it perform and finish to see if there's any problem with my HDDs), I ran processor stress tests for some hours - no error.
Everything was done with a non-overclocked system.
At first it was happening only when I fired up Pinnacle Studio 14/15...I formatted and installed the original driver the GPU came with - no success. I formatted again and installed the latest GPU driver downloaded from AMD & Sapphire(formatted before each driver installation)...the problem is still there.
I've tried lowering my CPU clock from 3.4GHz(stock) to 3.0GHz - no luck.
I have two computers (the second one is a PDual Core, 2GB DDR2,8600GT,1HDD...very basic) with two identical 630W NOX PSUs so I took the PSU from my Pentium PC and connected it to my AMD...the problem persists( I thought it could've been a PSU wear problem).
Again, the temperatures are by no means high - I keep my PC case open(side panels removed), the fans are all clean, and heatsinks are all copper-based.
I tried removing all but one DIMM(4GB DDR3 1600MHz / 1333MHz - tested with both freqs) - same problem.
I disconnected some HDDs - that didn't solve the issue either.
What is the next step that I can do to identify the component that isn't working in my PC?
RAM & GPU are really new - a few months old and have never been overclocked.
I disconnected USB devices from my PC. I received BSODs related to the following (I use BluescreenView)
22th of April: NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM / 25th: SPECIAL_POOL_DETECTED_MEMORY_CORRUPTION(C1) / 26th: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION(3B) / 27th: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL / 30th: UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP(7F) / 3rd of May: APC_INDEX_MISMATCH / 4th : DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL(D1)...
Strangely enough - after seeing Pinnacle freezing my whole PC...I used Sony Vegas 11 and everything was fine.
I have various video editing software on my PC and Pinnacle is the only one that causes this - I suspected the Pinnacle driver to be the culprit - but it used to work just fine some time ago with the exact same configuration.Now my PC freezes randomly - start Mozilla and it may freeze(or not, like now), fire up Chrome and same thing can happen....play a song and it may freeze while making an awful sound.
After the computer freezes - if I reset it(via the reset button on the case) it may not send an image to my display. I would have to reset it again and again and again...and it still wouldn't show anything on my display. Then, if I take out the power cord from my power supply ..wait for the energy to leak(about 5 sec) and reconnect it back...everything works fine in terms of image output.
NOW: I fired up Event Viewer in Win7 and:
The following list is there(for the 5th of May - that's today):
Error - Service Control Manager - The AODDriver4.01 service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified. The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load:
cdrom
I should say I have NO optical drives connected to my PC - I use an external DVD-RW (usb-based)
Critical - Kernel Power The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.
Critical - Kernel EventTracing - Session "Microsoft-Windows-Setup" stopped due to the following
Error - Audit events have been dropped by the transport. 0 error: 0xC000000D
I am exhaustingly looking for a solution to this issue as I spent a lot of money on my computer and I really need it to work. If there are ANY suggestions you can think of, PLEASE feel free to give me a hand.

Try installing the OS on one HD at a time, leaving the others connected, if the problem occurs on all your harddrives, chances are, it's not the harddrive

I currently have 3 HDDs in my computer. 2 of them are IDE and one is SATA. Since they were checked for errors and showed none...I guess it's all good from the HDD standpoint. I'll try to format my HDD(Windows partition only, of course) and see if there are any improvements.